“When it comes to the border and the wall, Trump’s willful estrangement from reality is so profound that network executives and newspaper editors spent part of Tuesday in strategy sessions about how to respond to his inevitable barrage of falsehoods. Should there be a crawl of words on the bottom of the television screen to correct him in real time? Could fact checkers work speedily enough to post rebuttals online…? This is where we find ourselves. Other presidents have been untrustworthy, and others have had to be called out on it. But not like this. This is surreal.”

“Trump can’t afford to lose.” He has the “biggest incentive” to dig into his position with “more to lose than the Democrats do. This shutdown was neither necessary nor inevitable…. It was the president who delivered the ultimatum: Fund the wall, he demanded, or he’d be “’proud to shut down the government for border security.’” Without an “outright victory,” Trump will lose “a fight that he picked. He’d end the shutdown weaker than he started. And some of his most ardent supporters could well turn on him for selling them out on his signature issue, affecting his re-election in 2020.” Still, “none of this guarantees a Trump victory.”